


When All's Said and Done

by Sylphie3000



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Eventual Romance, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, i guess?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-05-08 03:17:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14685323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylphie3000/pseuds/Sylphie3000
Summary: The Apocalypse waits for no man, and apparently neither does Fate. Fallout Soulmate AU.





	1. Chapter 1

Nick wakes, swathed in the warmth of his bed against the cool Boston air coming in from the window. The air smells distantly of the coffee Jenny must have made before heading to work, and of cleaner. Which is odd, considering that Boston typically smells like the bad end of a dog, but the neighbors _are_ entitled to a little cleaning every now and again. God knows he needs to tidy up, after all.

He lays there for a while yet, eyes closed, and takes in the feel of his apartment. The building sighs with the movement of the other residents, the air hanging with nostalgia and a sadness he can't quite place but grows stronger over time. It's… _nice_. Peaceful. He hasn't felt like this for a while. He's missed just allowing himself to just be, to exist.

But all things come to an end, and he stretches, scrunching his eyes against the bright, late-morning light and reaches with one hand for a pack of cigarettes on his nightstand.

There is one problem with this plan. Problem being, there aren't any cigarettes.

Worse, there's no nightstand. Just cold, hard linoleum under his reaching fingers. The hazy warmth of the bed starts to dissolve around him, replaced by an overwhelming sense of dread.

Nick's eyes snap open only to squint shut again against the harsh fluorescent light. _This_ , he will decide later, when he looks back on it, is the biggest mistake of his life.

Instead of the familiar walls of his apartment, he's in a room like a hospital quarantine chamber, white linoleum on the floors and pristine walls that only amplify the unsettling prickle on his skin. Nick himself is tucked away in a corner, lying prone on the floor, one hand outstretched. His skin looks almost paperwhite in the sanitized lighting, and when he flexes his fingers it doesn't quite feel like it's _his_ hand that's moving.

"Hello?" he says, voice hoarse and echoing off the blank, windowless walls. When the door directly across from him doesn't open and no answer springs forth from the plaster, he takes his chances moving. He pushes himself into a tense crouch, back to the wall, in one smooth motion - which is unnerving, considering the pain hunching over his desk for months on end has been giving him. Not that anything about this situation _isn't_ unnerving, but that ache has been his constant companion for almost a year, ever since he quit field work, ever since…

_Jenny._

Well.

_There goes the rest of_ that _good dream_ , he thinks, swallowing the lump in his throat, and stands the rest of the way up despite the long-familiar sinking pit in his stomach making a return.

In a corner, a camera fixed to the ceiling _whirrs_ to focus on his face. It looks like the same model the Boston Police Department uses in their interrogation rooms; manually operated, the blurry, greyscale footage used mostly in court, but the red eye that's boring into his own now has unnerved many a would-be criminal into talking.

But what on Earth did he _do_? The Boston Police Department and the jails are the only places he can think of that use those specific cameras, but he knows the PD inside and out and he's never seen a room like this in his life. So, jail? Doesn't make sense, given that this doesn't look like a prison cell. No bars, no toilet, nothing that makes it seem like he's supposed to live here.

Which begs the question: if not prison, or the Boston PD, then where the _hell_ is he?

There's only one way to find out.

He takes a single, slow step into the center of the room, towards that camera, and it's then that he notices three things:

One, the floor is farther away than it should be.

Two, he is naked as a jaybird.

And last but most importantly, his body is _not his own._

Tall and thin, muscled, whiter than a piece of paper, and as sexless as a doll, the arms and hands and feet that are responding to the mounting panic _are not his._

The fingers that reach up to card through hair rake over an empty scalp, trip over a seam on the top of a head that's _not Nick's._

His heartbeat kicks up a notch and is accompanied by a soft, uncomfortable buzz that grows louder by the second. That empty pit in his stomach that's been there since Jenny died grows with it, swallowing his mind in unrelenting blackness.

Strikingly, before mechanics he doesn't understand, doesn't even know he _has_ , overheat and he falls back into unconsciousness, he notices he doesn't have any fingernails, just the crescent shape of a cuticle etched into skin far too pale to ever be human.

_Fingernails_ , of all things.

\----

When Nick wakes up again, he's in a crumpled heap a few steps off the center of the room. Now, there are no illusions. No soft bed, no traffic to greet him when he wakes up.

He curls into the fetal position on the floor, scrambling to remember something, _anything_ , from therapy. Breathing techniques, counting, distractions, anything to take him away from that damn _morgue_ , from her corpse, her funeral, the sheer pain of it all. He doesn't open his eyes, or move. Whatever kind of body he got stuck in has a disturbing knack for staying still as the grave, and in an odd way it's almost comforting.

After a time, he resorts to the only distraction available to him short of waiting for Hell to freeze over, and traces his fingers over his hands, his legs, his face. Trying to explore the unfamiliar hills and valleys of this body without any way to look at them. Not that he'd _want_ to, anyways, what with how well it went last time. It's easier to move if he doesn't have to look at that inhuman off-white skin, he finds, and in his own blindness he memorizes this new body that responds to his commands while his mind floats somewhere in the corner, silent and grieving.

He doesn't know the date, but he knows how long he's been on the floor down to the second - hours at first, when he discovers that his mouth is dry and brushes against the wires in the back of his throat without any pain, despite whatever's left of a gag reflex kicking in.

Three days when he finds the vents along his neck and down his sides. They're small and very well hidden unless one runs their fingers against the grain.

Four when he risks opening his eyes in a final confirmation that he - if he's even Nick Valentine, at this point - is not human.

He lays there for so long he forgets to care, and tries to force these hands that somehow _are_ and _are not_ his to bend. He doesn't know if it's because they're not his hands, or because the linoleum underneath them reflects the glow of his eyes and he hates it.

Because of course his eyes glow, of course he knows the time like his own name and _of course_ he can hear the sound of whatever mechanics power this shell he's stuck in instead of a human heartbeat. Whatever he is, he's not Nick anymore. Not really, he thinks, because Valentine was five-foot-six and not the solid six-foot he is now, and had thick brown hair and hazel eyes that didn't _glow_ , God damn it.

And fingernails. It never occurred to him that robots wouldn't have fingernails, or that lacking them would bother him more than other bits that were more important, like a _heart_ , or a _liver_ , or a _dick_. All, unfortunately, missing.

Out of habit, or perhaps out of morbid curiosity, he runs his fingers along his right shoulder, where the dips and curves of Jenny's name, penned in the elegant golden cursive worthy of a reporter once crawled it's way across his skin. Back when he was still Nick With a Pulse, before he'd ever even met Jennifer Lands, he used to trace the lines of the tattoo for comfort. Jenny's dead now, of course, and Nick is… gone. Probably. Somehow.

Regardless, he'd hoped to find that tattoo there. To restore his humanity, or something just as intangible. He traces the swirls of his soulmate's cursive around a shoulder that isn't his with unfamiliar fingers. Even if the mark isn't there and Jenny's been dead for God knows how long, he keeps her name with him, under his fingers and in whatever computer's clanging around in his head in place of a brain.

That hole in his sternum grows and swallows him again while the camera watches from the ceiling.

He doesn't stand up.

And eventually, he doesn't wake up either.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angela comes out of cryostasis. She... doesn't take it well.

_Cold_. Heart-wrenching, blood stopping, mind numbing _cold_. She’s frozen in place, on the brink of panic but she can’t quite remember why. 

Her head hurts, either from the angle or the weight of her hair, but she has one massive migraine coming on.

She can’t feel her nose or fingers -- or, when she takes stock of what hurts and what doesn’t, anything from the knees down. It’s a wonder she’s still standing, to be honest. If she _is_ still standing, that is. Everything’s hazy, but she remembers standing. 

Why is she standing? And why is the air colder than Boston on Christmas? 

She should’ve brought gloves. She would’ve, if she’d known the Vault was going to be like _this_. 

It takes effort, but she opens her frost-crusted eyes. She’s surrounded by grey paneling, settled into a metal array in a position that grows more uncomfortable the longer she’s aware of it. In front of her, an opaque window grants her a small glimpse of the hallway.

_This… isn’t a shower_ , she thinks, and blinks dumbly at the window. _What?_

Wait. 

She’s in the Vault. As in, Vault 101. The nuclear bomb shelter. For when everything goes to hell.

Hysteria rises again in her gut like the jagged edge of a knife and she throws herself against the door with her full weight. It shudders open under her pounding hands and at last -- _at long, long last_ \-- she’s free of that wretched chill.

An alarm sounds immediately when she falls face first onto the floor, shivering and curled into herself. Something about evacuation, an error in the system. _Yeah, no kidding._ Regardless, between that and the stale, tomblike air of the hall, her panic gives way to a trepidation that makes it that much harder to warm up.

It’s there, thawing on the floor, curled into the fetal position in a desperate bid to dull the pain of regaining feeling in her extremities and to stop the uncontrollable shaking, that she remembers herself. Angela Castro, community college dropout, twenty-one years old and apparent survivor of the fucking Apocalypse. 

Angela pushes herself into a kneel, too unsteady on her feet after who-knows-how-long in a freezer to stand. 

_A freezer_ , she thinks, and wipes her hands on her thaw-drenched vault suit. Meant to preserve, most likely, but for how long? 

In front of her is another freezer-pod, but unlike the others she can’t see inside through the thick layer of frost. A glimpse at the pods around her accounts for some of her neighbors from Sanctuary Hills, an older couple from out of town, and her mother. 

Nora Castro lies in the pod next to Angela’s, gray-streaked hair in a bob around her face and lipstick pristine as the morning the bombs fell. However long ago that was. Could be yesterday, a week ago, a year, a century. 

That’s the thing, though -- if everyone’s been on ice for however long, and Angela’s out now, then why is everyone else still unconscious? 

She struggles to stand, but manages despite the dread weighing down her stomach, using the ridged edge of her pod as a much-needed prop. For a second, she thinks the dials on the control panel to her mother’s chamber is broken; the only hand on any of the three faces that’s reading anything is the temperature gauge at negative one-ninety-six degrees celcius. 

Then, that sneaking dread in the hollow of her stomach returns to it’s comfort zone as of late: white, searing panic. She flips the lever on the panel with fumbling fingers, prays to any God that’s still with her that it opens. 

“Malfunction in Cryo-pod Manual Release Override,” the speaker tells her, and the panic seeps through her veins, into her bones, so cold it burns. 

They’re _trapped_.

Angela’s knuckles are white around the lever, straining with the death grip she has on it. Her breath hitches with a sob as she takes a miniscule step backwards, and the air of the room is a wire strung tight, so close to breaking.

Slowly, she drags her eyes to the pod behind her, the one across the hall from her own, and with a clarity she didn’t know she’d be able to conjure she knows who’s inside. Worse, she knows who’s _not_.

She doesn’t remember the shaky, lunging steps to that iced-over freezer, or when she started crying, but when her head clocks back in the door is swinging open and she’s face to face with a corpse. Her stepfather, to be exact, slouched over his chest, a dark stain spread over his stomach and minus one infant child. 

He fought tooth and nail for her baby brother, she _saw_ it. By God, she remembers. He died with Nora’s name on his lips, his eyes locked on what little he could’ve seen of her face from his pod. 

A laugh echoes through her memory, cold and ruthless, belonging to a bald mercenary with a scar and the smile of a man that’s taken lives and enjoyed it.

Angela takes his hand, presses his fingers to her forehead, and hopes he wasn’t in pain when he died. Which, given what she knows about stomach wounds and stomach acid, isn’t likely. 

She stands there, shaking, until her legs ache and the lifeless hand she’s holding starts to hit room temperature. It could just be that her own hands are still cold from the freezer, but even so, it wouldn’t do for him to start to _rot_.

With a heavy, shuddering sigh, she takes a step back from him. The soldier, the husband, the father -- _her_ father, dead. Just like that. The thought shatters something inside her and the tears start again, buckling her knees and she falls, her fingers still wrapped around Nate’s like a vice.

It is, eventually, the fear of decay that makes her shut the pod. She makes him as comfortable as possible in the small array and brushes damp hair off his death-gray face. On an impulse, she slips his thick, golden wedding ring off his left hand. She wants -- _needs_ , if she’s being honest with herself -- something to keep her parents with her. Something that means that she doesn’t have to say goodbye. Not yet, anyways. 

Not until she gets her baby brother back. 

With the ring held tight in her hand, she steps back from Nate’s pod. 

Right, she thinks, taking a shaky breath and turning towards the entrance. _First things first: find a decent shirt, and then get the hell out of here._


	3. Chapter 3

It’s a day like any other in Diamond City. The shriek of schoolchildren as they race past his door on their way to classes let him know it’s morning, and the entrance of Ellie Perkins, secretary extraordinaire, lets him know it’s time to take a break. 

“One of these days,” she says as she enters the foyer, shucking her jacket and hanging it on the coat rack, “I’m going to come to work in the morning to find you somewhere other than hunched over your desk. Did you even run your diagnostics?”

Nick flashes her a grin and stretches in his chair for the first time in hours. It’s not that he _needs_ it, but it almost works some stiffness out of the old pipes. “Course I did, Ellie, what do you take me for?” 

“A detective, occasionally.”

“Keep talkin’ like that and you’ll break an old bot’s heart.” 

She chuckles and swats him on the shoulder as she passes. “Make any progress in the Anderson case?” 

“None,” he sighs, amusement gone, swivelling his chair to face her as she sits. “I’ve been pullin’ strings all night, looking over the notes, listening to that _damn_ recording -- I just can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something.”

“Take a break,” she says, and holds out her hand expectantly. It’s more of a demand than a suggestion, and an argument they’ve worn like an old pair of shoes, so Nick sets to organizing the loose case files as best he can before handing them to his secretary. 

She flips through the stack once, and then again, slower so as to read the tops of the pages. “Get me a coffee while you’re out? I get the feeling I’m gonna need it.”

“Sure, sure. Milk?” he asks, shrugging his coat on in one smooth motion.

“Better not. I’d rather save the caps,” she says with a small frown as she pulls one paper out and squints at Nick’s scribblings. “Actually, If _this_ is what I’m deciphering, then I’ll take milk.”

He shakes his head, smiling, and turns to leave. Behind him, his secretary sighs.

Diamond City never really changes. It’s the nature of cities, he supposes, no matter how small or crowded they are. He lights up a cigarette and imagines he feels the burn of the smoke when he takes a lazy drag. Smoke curls out of the ragged edge of his jaw and into the sky. Step by step, he does a loop around the stands, losing himself in the morning hustle and bustle of the biggest city in the Commonwealth. It’s nothing compared to what Boston was in its heyday, but it’s enough to feel like home.

It’s when he rounds third base that he feels it. An… _itch_. A pain, really, like he’s fallen in poison ivy. If poison ivy still exists at this point, but even if it does it shouldn’t affect _him_ , of all people. Least of all his bad arm, with it’s exposed wiring and metal. But then, it’s probably just an irritating short-circuit and he’ll find a frayed cord somewhere, duct-tape it back together and it’ll be fine. Nothing he hasn’t dealt with before anyways, and after flexing the fingers to see if they still respond, he shoves it in a corner of his mind and moves on with his walk.

Except the pain refuses to be ignored, and as he stops for short conversations with former clients of his and picks up Ellie’s coffee he finds himself idly scratching his forearm like he’s been doing it since he walked off the assembly line. There’s not even anything there to itch, so why…? 

All at once, the frayed edges of his skin, just above the elbow, pick it up, and that coffee he promised Ellie hits the ground. Because this pain, chafing like freshly-shaved skin under a cheap razor, is suddenly familiar. 

Except it’s not, at least not to _him_ , not really, even though he remembers it like it were yesterday. Waking up one morning at a fresh-faced fifteen, short and skinny, with as much attitude as he had freckles on his face, to a thousand hot needles covering his left shoulder. And that burst of elation when he’d finally been able to read the word left over, penned in fine cursive: _Jennifer_. 

Now, Jenny’s long since dead, the end of the world has come and gone, and Nick himself is a robot. A _robot_ , for fuck’s sake -- he’s not even a _person_! Just a name and an outfit, some hand-me-down memories uploaded onto the oldest piece of junk the crackpot scientists at the Institute could find.

Hell must have officially frozen over, because there’s _no way_ this can be happening again. 

Nick stumbles away from the crowd he’s just splattered with coffee, ignoring more than one jeer about glitches and _rusty fucking pieces of junk_. Under the safety of an overhang, away from the hustle and bustle of the Diamond, he clutches his arm and tries to _think_ , god damn it, _think_.

_Alright, detective. What first?_ The exposed metal under his coat sleeve is heating up by the second. Stress has kicked his fans into overdrive, which is good, but it’s not helping his arm any, which isn’t. Wires could start to fuse, or fry altogether if he’s not careful, and even though he knows basic bot maintenance by this point, replacing all that circuitry is a little out of his league. Losing his arm, even to whomever the universe hates enough to stick with him, isn’t an option.

So. Solution: cool down. Step one: get back to the Agency. It’s bad enough that Nick just made an ass of himself in the the middle of the marketplace; he doesn’t need to strip down in public too. 

Getting back home takes forever, even though it’s only hurried minute or two, and next thing he knows, Ellie’s in front of him, one concerned hand on his shoulder and panic in her eyes. 

“Nick? Are you alright? What’s going on?” 

“I don’t know. I -- my arm --” His voice is low with static, almost too quiet to hear in the high-pitched whine of his fans.

“Did you get in a fight? Blow a circuit? What --”

He doesn’t respond, instead sliding his coat off, carefully over his overheating arm, to let it pool on the floor. With shaking, clumsy fingers, he unbuttons the sleeve of his worn dress shirt and slides it up to his elbow. 

He can feel an overload coming on in his glitching vision and the thunder of coolant in his chest. As if from a distance, he hears Ellie’s voice, dark and hushed.

“Is that,” she says, tracing the blurred lines coiling around the twin rods of his arm with her fingertips, “what I think it is?” 

Like clockwork, like magic under her fingers, the blurred lines across the metal sharpen and crisp. Ellie gasps, hard and sharp, that quick mind of hers narrowing down the possibilities to only the impossible. “Nick?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I --” he stops, vision glitching into yellows and blues. “I’ve gotta sit down.” 

He slumps into Ellie’s desk, scattering a stack of files she’d had precariously balanced on the edge. Behind him, a coffee cup shatters on the floor. 

“Okay, okay. Alright,” she says, slinging his free arm over her shoulders. “Come on, buddy. Let’s get you to bed.”

“Bed?”

“Yeah, you know, that mattress you turned into a spare filing cabinet? I think you oughta lie down, Nicky.” 

He nods, and stumbles in the direction of his cubby under the stairs. He’s never really used it for much, just a place to sit and read or a bed for guests back when Ellie lived upstairs, but he’s never slept in it. Never had to, but there’s a first time for everything and right now he could use a nap. 

Ellie sits him on his bed, a worried furrow in her brow and lips a thin line. “Are you okay?”

“I…” he trails off, watches his skeletal hand move. One by one, he flexes each joint of each finger. Satisfied, his eyes find their way to the band of black around his not-forearm. The letters have sharpened, but it’s just as illegible as it was before, all twined around the two metal rods. 

“What does it say?” Ellie asks, her voice soft, the same tone she uses with crying mothers and heartbroken lovers. 

“Can’t read it. Letters are too small, too cramped,” he says, twisting his arm this way and that to get a better look. Slowly, he realizes, the pain has gone, leaving only a pins-and-needles tingling on the very edges of his ruined skin, like the limb had fallen asleep. His systems are cooling, even if his head is still reeling. No wires have fused, no circuits have blown. In that, at least, he is well. In everything else, though...

She holds her hand out to him, a question in the hesitant bend of her fingers. As his secretary, she’s had to help him patch himself up more than once. A blown coolant pump, a severed nerve in his leg -- she’s seen just how robotic he is under his coat. But this? A mark, like the one Detective Valentine of the BADTFL had on his shoulder, like Ellie has right behind her ear? 

It’s almost enough to make him _human_. 

He gives her his arm and watches as she follows the letters with her fingertips, mouthing letters as she goes. She twists his arm this way and that, always gentle, trying to decipher the universe’s code. 

“You’re right, Nicky. It’s too small for me to make out. God, of all the places for it to show up…” she sighs and shakes her head before looking back up to meet his eyes. “I did get one letter though. Here, look.”

She twists his arm to the outside and touches her finger to the tattoo. In a sharp scrawl, somewhere between cursive and Nick’s own chicken scratch, is the letter _A_.


End file.
